You’ve already kind of seen the finished product of our chair we reupholstered from Pixel’s Watch Me Grow photos, but I wanted to show you more of the process we went through to get this little yellow beauty.
Here is the condition we found the poor saggy chair in at Goodwill. The fabric was pretty worn in spots and the caning on the sides was starting to break, but it was the perfect size and style for the space we have in our living room. It just needed some love.
The hardest part of the process was taking everything apart. There were so many staples holding it together.
The cushions had seen better days so we ended up replacing those with fresh new foam. As we took stuff off we made sure to take lots of pictures so we could remember how it all went together. We used all the old foam and fabric as templates for cutting the new pieces.
Once we got everything off my dad cleaned the chair really well and touched up a few spots with stain. It looked one hundred times better when he was done and we hadn’t even started putting it back together yet.
Finding the fabric was a lot harder than I thought. I knew I wanted something similar to what was already on the chair. I love yellow and it would be the perfect pop of color to add to our decor. I also wanted something with a soft cozy texture.
We ended up going to the fabric district downtown LA. There are so many shops full of fabric that it was a little overwhelming. I brought along a swatch of the old fabric I had taken off the chair and went in each store to show the owners what I was looking for. Finally I found one store where the man was able to climb through rolls and rolls of fabric to find just what I was looking for – a nice bright yellow cotton velvet fabric.
For the buttons we went to a local upholstery shop, gave them some of our fabric and asked them to cover ten new buttons for us.
The best part was when we got to start putting all the pieces back together. It was such a fun project and we felt pretty accomplished when we finished. We gave an old sad chair new life.
